Demanding the Impossible

Nevertheless, despite all the regimented and static aspects of his utopia, Fourier was the most libertarian of the nineteenth-century French Utopians. His wish to transform repulsive work into meaningful play, his call for the free satisfaction of sexuality, his stress on the social and sexual minimum, and his organic cosmology continue to inspire anarchists and ecologists alike.

12 German Libertarians

THERE HAVE BEEN TWO remarkable libertarians in Germany who scotch the myth that the German character is intrinsically authoritarian and given to State worship. While Hegel was denying the distinction between society and the State and arguing that citizens could only realize themselves through the State, his near contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt narrowly drew the limits of legitimate State action. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche too reacted against growing German nationalism and Bismarck’s attempt to create a strong centralized State. He developed one of the most eloquent defences of individualism ever made, and deserves a central place in any history of libertarian thought.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Humboldt’s reputation as a libertarian thinker rests on one book. But while The Limits of State Action (1792) came close to anarchism, Humboldt ultimately remained in the liberal camp.1 The work was not published in English until 1854 as The Sphere and Duties of Government; it considerably influenced John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty (1859). However, the anarchist historian Max Nettlau has called Humboldt’s work ‘a curious mixture of essentially anarchist ideas and authoritarian prejudice’.2 More recently, Noam Chomsky has been inspired by Humboldt and through him his ideas have reached a new generation of libertarians and anarchists.3

Humboldt absorbed the radical message of the Enlightenment, particularly Leibniz’s theory of human perfectibility, Rousseau’s belief that moral self-determination is the essence of human dignity, and Kant’s stress on the need to treat each individual as an end and never simply as a means. To this, he added an idealized version of the ancient Greek model of the fully rounded and harmonious human personality.

Humboldt’s starting-point is the creative individual and his ultimate aim is to achieve the greatest individuality with the widest freedom possible in a variety of situations. It is his belief that only the spontaneous and creative energies of the individual constitute the vitality of a society. Self-education is thus the key concept of his political theory.4

Humboldt wrote:

The true end of Man or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes.5

The most desirable condition is therefore the one in which each individual ‘enjoys the most absolute freedom of developing himself by his own energies, in his perfect individuality’.6 This principle must be the basis of every political system.

While Humboldt saw the individual and society in organic and aesthetic terms – as flowering plants and works of art – he insisted that the State is nothing more than a piece of machinery. Like later anarchists, he distinguishes between the State and society, or what he calls the State constitution and the national community: ‘And it is strictly speaking the latter – the free cooperation of the members of the nation – which secures all those benefits for which men longed when they formed themselves into society.’ He further recommends small associations, since in a large one a person easily becomes merely an instrument: ‘The more a man acts on his own, the more he develops himself.’7

The basis of Humboldt’s criticism of government is that it restricts personal autonomy and initiative:

Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.8

Freedom, he argued, ‘is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity’; Humboldt was therefore concerned with ‘greater freedom for human energies, and a richer diversity of circumstances and situations’.9

The paternalist State which seeks the positive welfare of the citizen is therefore harmful. By treating its subjects as children, it prevents them from learning from their own experience, it lessens the quality of their experience by imposing its own uniform character, and it weakens their initiative and independence. By trying to do good, it saps energy and weakens sympathy and mutual assistance. It can never improve the morals of its citizens since ‘all moral culture springs solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul’ and ‘The greater a man’s freedom, the more self-reliant and well-disposed towards others he becomes.”10

Rejecting unnecessary political regulations, Humboldt contemplates the possibility of an anarchist society:

If we imagine a community of enlightened men – fully instructed in their truest instances, and therefore mutually well-disposed and closely bound together – we can easily imagine how voluntary contracts with a view to their security, would be entered into among them … Agreements of this kind are infinitely to be preferred to any State arrangements.11

Humboldt’s ideal society based on fellowship in which each individual is independent and yet part of society has something akin to libertarian socialism. It was precisely his aim to outline the kind of political organization which would allow ‘the most diverse individuality and the most original independence’ to coexist equally with ‘the most diverse and profound associations of human beings with each other – a problem which nothing but the most absolute liberty can ever help to solve’.12 Nevertheless, Humboldt retains the need for the nightwatchman State to stand guard over its citizens. Its principal role is negative: to maintain security, against both the external attacks of foreign enemies and internal dissension. Like Thomas Paine, he sees that State is a necessary means; ‘and since it is always attended with restrictions of freedom, a necessary evil’.13 The only justification for State interference is to prevent harm to others. Thus, while he came to the borders of anarchism, Humboldt ultimately remained in the liberal camp. This cannot be said of his compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche who came to anarchist conclusions quite independently.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Despite his erroneous reputation as the inventor of fascism, Nietzsche may be counted amongst the great libertarians for his attack on the State, his rejection of systems, his transvaluation of values, and his impassioned celebration of personal freedom and individuality. His libertarian views formed only part of his revolutionary attempt to reorientate totally European thought and sensibility. As a result, his influence was far-reaching and complex.

At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s form of individualism won many converts in bohemian and artistic circles throughout Europe – much to Kropotkin’s dismay as he considered it too epicurean and egoistic.14 Amongst anarchist thinkers, Emma Goldman also welcomed him into the family and admired his ‘giant mind’ and vision of the free individual.15 Rudolf Rocker admired his analysis of political power and culture.16 Herbert Read acknowledged that he was the first to make people conscious of the importance of the individual in evolution.17 But his influence was not only restricted to anarchist intellectuals – Salvador Segui, the Catalan syndicalist who helped found the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, was also deeply impressed by his message.

Nietzsche did not call himself an anarchist. He claimed that the anarchist of his day was, like the Christian, a decadent, ‘the mouthpiece of a declining strata of society’ because his complaints about others and society came from weakness and a narrow spirit of revenge.18 Clearly this is true of some anarchists as well as some socialists. When the resentful anarchist demands with righteous indignation that his rights be respected he fails to see that his real suffering lies in his failure to create a new life for himself. At the same time, Nietzsche admired those anarchists who asserted their rights: many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled because ‘a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it’.19

With considerable psychological acumen, Nietzsche argued that anarchists of his day demonstrated that

The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of overfull, future-pregnant strength (my term for this, as one knows, is the word ‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the misdeveloped, needy, underprivileged who destroys, who must destroy, because the existing, and even all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him.20

Nietzsche was probably thinking of Bakunin here, whom his friend Richard Wagner knew. Those followers of Bakunin and the terrorists who destroy and maim in the name of freedom and justice are clearly motivated by hatred. Most anarchist thinkers, however, especially Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, were motivated by a sense of the overflowing richness and vitality of life in their wish to overthrow existing values and institutions.

Nietzsche thought that literary decadence sets in when instead of a work of art forming a whole, there is ‘an anarchy of atoms’.21 As a child of his age, he too recognized that he was a decadent but he tried to resist it. His work does not form a coherent whole, indeed he deliberately rejected system-making as a distortion of the truth. The will to construct a system shows a lack of integrity, and, moreover, ineradicable convictions are prisons.

Nietzsche’s method is therefore experimental; he approaches his subjects tangentially. His style is aphoristic, rhapsodic and ironic. Engulfed in iconoclastic fervour, he is deliberately paradoxical. He wanted to soak his thoughts in blood, to show that knowledge has to be lived to be understood. It is not surprising that Nietzsche should often have been misinterpreted.

The most serious accusation against him is that he was a forerunner of Nazism. This accusation was made possible by the work of his sister, who selectively edited his works when he became mad towards the end of his life, and by Nazi ideologues who took certain of his phrases and redeployed them completely out of their context. It is only by radically distorting his message that Nietzsche can be seen as an anti-Semite, a racist, or a German nationalist.22 He despised and detested German culture, was utterly opposed to German nationalism, and thought the State the poison of the people. One of the main reasons why he broke with Wagner was because of the composer’s anti-Semitism. Nietzsche’s metaphor of the ‘blond beast’ became a model for the elevation of the Aryan German, but he was no racist, and even recommended racial mixing. Certainly he celebrated war, but like Blake he was thinking of intellectual not physical strife; he was well aware that ‘blood is the worst witness of truth’.23

Nietzsche’s atrocious views on women however cannot be explained away. ‘In woman,’ he wrote in Thus Spoke Zaruthustra, ‘a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not capable of friendship: she knows only love.’ A woman should be trained ‘for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly’. In the same work, Nietzsche ironically makes an old woman say ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’24

Like Proudhon’s and Tolstoy’s, Nietzsche’s attitude to women is lamentable. But his rehearsals of traditional misogyny can at least be better understood when we remember that his childhood was dominated by his mother, sister, grandmother and two aunts; his life as a lonely bachelor visiting European spas was full of frivolous women; and his relationship with the only love of his life, Lou Salomé, ended in failure. His complex relationship with women was aggravated by the fact that he became infected with syphilis from prostitutes as a young man. The disease eventually made him mad in the last ten years of his life and finally killed him. Ironically, the great philosophical misogynist was once photographed pulling a cart with Lou Salomé holding a whip in her hand! Nonetheless, all his antics did not prevent Emma Goldman from admiring his libertarian insights.

The most important premiss of Nietzsche’s philosophy is his uncompromising atheism. Kropotkin acknowledged that next to Fourier, Nietzsche was unequalled in undermining Christianity.25 He not only popularized the slogan ‘God is Dead’ but joked that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. Like Bakunin, Nietzsche believed that traditional Christianity is a form of slave morality, with its stress on humility, pity and piety. Above all, it was decadent because it tried to extirpate the passions.

Unlike Bakunin, however, Nietzsche did not believe that law or morality could be derived from nature. Nature is entirely arbitrary and contingent: Lord Chance rules. Indeed, Nature is so disordered that given infinite time, finite space and constant energy in the world, Nietzsche argued, everything is likely to recur eternally. In this scheme of things man appears as a ‘thoughtless accident’, standing on a rope stretched over an abyss. His mind and body are two aspects of one being. The will, not reason, is paramount and determines both his thought and action. In Nietzsche’s view of history there is no rational pattern or moral purpose to be discovered.

The problem for Nietzsche was to find meaning in a godless and arbitrary world based on chance and eternal recurrence. But he did not give into nihilistic despair. In our own lives, we are free to decide whether we want to be sickened or exhilarated by the journey, whether we want to follow the herd and act out inherited beliefs or to create our own life and values. Coming from nowhere, and going nowhere, we can nevertheless create ourselves and shape the world around us.

As in nature so in art: out of chaos human beings can create order. At first Nietzsche called the emotional element in life and art ‘Dionysus’, and its antithesis ‘Apollo’. He saw Greek tragedy as the upshot of Apollo’s harnessing of Dionysus, that is to say the creative force overcoming the ‘animal’ in the individual. Dionysus came to epitomize the sublimated will to power, and was therefore synonymous in Nietzschean vocabulary with übermensch, the man in whom the will to power is sublimated into creativity.26

What most characterizes Nietzsche’s work is his libertarian insistence that the individual can throw off inherited values and beliefs and create his own. Like Stirner, he recognized that values are not given by God or nature but are human creations: every people has its own language of good and evil. While all moral codes are relative, their common element is the will to power.

Nietzsche perceptively saw that vengeance or resentment is at the core of most moral codes, which reveal themselves in their stress on punishment. He also recognized that public opinion, which many anarchists rely on to replace law, inevitably checks the individual from realizing himself: the ‘You’ of the crowd is older than the ‘I’. In these circumstances, the love of one’s neighbour is often a vicious form of selfishness, the result of bad love of oneself. In modern mass society, ‘One man runs to his neighbours because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself.’27

In higher and mixed cultures Nietzsche maintains that master and slave moralities have developed, and are often juxtaposed within one person. The rulers determine the master morality which exalts those states of being which determine the order of rank, such as severity and power. The ruled create a slave morality stressing pity, humility and patience to help them endure the burden of existence. Master and slave have contrary definitions of morality: according to the master, the ‘good’ man inspires fear; according to the slave, the ‘evil’ man inspires fear while the good man is harmless.28 But Nietzsche would have us transcend these types of morality; the emancipated person goes beyond existing definitions of good and evil and creates his own anew. In his own moral revaluation, Nietzsche himself valued honesty, courage, self-discipline, strength, and generosity.

Nietzsche argued that our fundamental drive is the will to power. Even the pursuit of truth is often a disguised will to power. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power is one of his most misunderstood doctrines. He celebrates not power over nature or over others but over oneself. He considered the will to power over others to be the will of the weak: the really strong person seeks power only over himself in order to forge his own destiny. The only person one should obey is oneself, and great power reveals itself in self-mastery and is measured by joy. The will to power is therefore an ‘instinct to freedom’, to transcend and perfect oneself.

Nietzsche calls the developed person übermensch. It is usually translated as ‘superman’ but a more accurate translation is ‘overman’. The ‘overman’ overcomes himself and sublimates his will to power into creativity. His greatest creation is himself. He is able to face the arbitrary nature of the world without pity, nausea and fear, and affirm life with all its suffering. Where for Hobbes power is essentially a means of security, for Nietzsche it is ‘the state of being that man desires for its own sake as his own ultimate end’.29

Nietzsche’s ideal of transformed humanity is that of the individual who overcomes his feelings of pity and terror and makes a work of art out of himself. His call ‘You must come who you are’ is a call for every individual to reach his or her full stature, to realize their complete potential as an act of creative will: ‘to become them who we are—the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves their own laws, those who create themselves’.30 The emancipated human being is an egoist concerned with developing himself, but he helps the unfortunate not out of pity but because he overflows with generosity and strength. He values freedom, creativity, joy, and laughter. He lives dangerously and makes a Dionysian affirmation of life. His ultimate ideal is to realize in himself the ‘eternal joy of becoming’.31

Freedom for Nietzsche is ‘the will to self-responsibility’. He thought the struggle to achieve freedom more important than its attainment since it brings out the best in people. It can be measured in individuals and nations by ‘the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft’.32 Freedom is something one has and does not have, something one wants and achieves. To expand human freedom is a never-ending process of struggle in which one seeks mastery over desire for mere happiness or well-being. In politics and art, Nietzsche observed that the claim to independence, to free development, to laissez aller is advanced most heatedly by precisely those for whom ‘no curb could be too strong. Nietzsche thus understood progress in the sense of a return to nature but it is not a going back but a ‘going-up into a high, free even frightful nature and naturalness, such as plays with great tasks, is permitted to play with them.’33 The ideal for Nietzsche is complete self-creation and self-determination, to become a ‘self-propelling wheel’ who transforms chance into conscious intention.34 The symbols of Zarathustra are the eagle and the serpent, creatures of power and knowledge who fly the highest and creep the lowest; a tree on a mountainside, the roots of which plunge deeper into the earth as the branches reach for the sky; and a laughing lion, a combination of strength, control and joy.

With these assumptions, it is no surprise that Nietzsche despised his contemporaries. His critique of European culture and politics is unparalleled in its spiteful vehemence:

Just look at these superfluous people! They steal for themselves the works of inventors and the treasures of the wise: they call their theft culture – and they turn everything to sickness and calamity.

Just look at these superfluous people! They are always ill, they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another and cannot even digest themselves.

Just look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves poorer with it. They desire power and especially the lever of power, plenty of money – these impotent people!

See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another and so scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

They all strive towards the throne: it is madness they have – as if happiness sat upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne – and often the throne upon filth, too.35

Nietzsche makes clear that the new idol of his contemporaries was the State. There were still peoples and herds in the world, but in Europe there were only States. He defined the State in terms which no anarchist could deny:

The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of the peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hand a sword and a hundred desires over them.

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.36

Nietzsche goes on to say that the State was invented for the superfluous. ‘I call it the State where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the State where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the State where universal slow suicide is called – life.’ It beckons the ‘preachers of death’. It claims that there is nothing greater on earth and that it is ‘the regulating finger of God’. It is nothing less than a ‘cunning device of Hell … a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours’. The church moreover is a kind of State and the State is a ‘hypocrite dog’ because it wants absolutely to be the most important beast on earth.37

Nietzsche did not restrict his criticism only to the Prussian State, for he attacked the whole conception of politics and political parties. Once they have been attained, he argued that liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal and subsequently nothing is more harmful to freedom. Liberalism comes to mean the ‘reduction to the herd animal’.38

As for the relationship between culture and the State, Nietzsche insisted that the two are antagonists. Those who gain political power pay heavily for ‘power makes stupid’. Culture and the State live off each other, one thrives at the expense of the other: ‘All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political:39

Certainly Nietzsche was no egalitarian. He despised the ‘rabble’ and saw his contemporaries as superfluous in their pursuit of wealth and status. They were utterly corrupted by decadence and ressentiment in their ethics of material comfort and envy. In thinking that there had been only a few truly developed human beings in the past, Nietzsche however was an elitist rather than an aristocrat. Ability is not related to blood. Even the slave can show nobility by rebelling. Humanity is not condemned forever: the earth still remains free for great souls who can lead free lives. In the final analysis, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a song of freedom and creativity for the individual to make himself or herself anew. The individual and the moment have infinite value: ‘so live that you must wish to live again.’